Ways to End the World

I had an exchange with one of the bloggers at Feministe (and a few commenters) that was so frustrating and so deeply unproductive that I planned several posts on the subject and discarded all of them. I’ve learned that when you end up at an impasse with someone in an argument it’s often more productive to let the issue go for a while and then bring it to others. My hope is that you guys can make something useful of what felt like wasted time. I’m going to leave the details vague and not dig up names in an effort to avoid making this a grudge thing — though I hope it doesn’t come across as passive-aggressive in its new form.

Whatever.

You may remember that I was unhappy because one of the bloggers over there posted about how men performed the vast majority of violence, and how this violence had been normalized. In other words, she was arguing that male violence was considered standard and was, as a result, more common. There was more to her argument than that but this is where I took issue — because while her limited assertion was correct, she had made an important and troubling omission. In fact, she had made the exact same troubling omission that most other people make when they discuss violence: they fail to describe the extent to which men are overwhelmingly the victims, as well as the perpetrators, of violence. This was particularly ironic in this post because if the normalization of violence perpetrated by men is a problem, surely the normalization of violence committed against men was also a problem worthy of note.

This is probably my main complaint about feminist rhetoric. It’s common to describe the extent to which men are disproportionately violent, but vanishingly unlikely that you’ll see it acknowledged that men are far more likely to be the victims of male violence than are women. This actually perpetuates what it means to ameliorate by normalizing an image of masculinity wherein men are horrifically violent, rapacious, subhuman beasts (the same comment thread, in fact, played host to an oh-so-ironic series of posts on the oppressive and even genocidal measures that would be necessary if men were truly so violent, which was hilarious let me tell you). I don’t mean to suggest that the account of society wherein men are disproportionately violent is inaccurate in any way. I mean to suggest that it’s misleading in the extreme, and actually damaging to the feminist cause, to pretend that men are constantly crushing women under their heels by way of a mixture of brutal assault and sexual violence — it would be far more accurate to say, in terms of physical violence, that men are destroying themselves. The mindset that enables this behavior is damaging to women, but it’s not as one-sided as some would have you believe.

I don’t bring this up so regularly because I’m opposed to the feminist project. I think it’s important and I support it, often with this blog. My concern is that it’s actually harmful to that cause, and furthermore harmful to men, to participate in the normalization of violence against men. This particularly concerns me in relationship to war, which is made possible in part by the valorization of said violence between men. I’m also concerned by the extent to which this attitude leads to domestic abuse of men by women — a real  phenomenon of uncertain commonality that many choose to pretend almost never occurs at all.

Furthermore, as I’ve written before, I think that the feminist movement is uniquely capable of helping with the project of raising awareness among men of the damage we do to each other in crime and in war. I’m not asking for it to become a plank of the party platform, as it were. I’m asking for a little help. Most of all I’m asking simply that feminists refrain from noting the that the majority of violence is perpetrated by men without proceeding to mention that they are also the primary victims. It’s a small request — a request, as I see it, for honesty and decency. I ask for this help because men are not yet equipped to do it for themselves. I ask because the vast majority of so-called “men’s movements” have been devoted to anti-feminist action and advocacy, which has rendered the concept — which should be fairly neutral in and of itself — utterly unattractive to the sort of men who could help to work on this problem.

This was, however, apparently far too much to ask. I was attacked as essentially an anti-feminist, and I was told that I was just being another “WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ” troll. This is unpersuasive — I didn’t bring up the problems of men in an unrelated situation, I brought them up when they couldn’t have been more pertinent. Indeed, if we realize that the violence of men (the subject of the post) is also the problem of men, what I was saying couldn’t have been more pertinent.

And of course men will occasionally come up in discussions of women’s rights, concerns, needs, and so on,  seeing as there are two sexes and one can’t really say much about one without at least considering the other.

I was told that it was wrong for me to criticize the author in that way because I was using my privilege to control her speech. This might be true in some sense — privilege is often invisible to its beneficiaries, so who am I to say? — but it’s worth noting that if this is true, there can never be any productive criticism of women by men. After all, we would merely be using our privilege to dominate them. I’m open to the possibility that on some level this is true! But if it is, that would kind of suck horrifically — and I have to admit I would rather lose interest in conversation if I knew the only thing I was allowed to do was listen to the women in my life and take careful notes. Maybe it would be better to assume I could have valid criticisms.

I was also told that said privilege meant it was my responsibility to take care of the problem myself. This is counter-productive in several ways. It’s wrong to assume that because I’m a man I have a bigger and better platform than any woman. If you look at Feministe’s readership and you look at mine, it becomes fairly obvious that this isn’t true. It’s also rather strange to suggest that I should be concerned with feminist issues — and I am, and presumably the writers of Feministe like it that way — without expecting any interest in return. Obviously there are a lot of issues where it would be silly to ask for help (I think it’s widely recognized that men need health care, good jobs, etc.) but this is an area where most people don’t even have the conceptual framework in place necessary to understand my argument. Feminists do. That’s why I keep asking them for help or at least basic acknowledgment and acceptance of my concerns.

The way I explained it in the thread was that if they wanted me to be an ally for them, I didn’t think it was too much to ask that they do the same for me.

I was told that this isn’t how being an ally works. Apparently it’s understood only to refer to someone with more privilege helping someone with less. I should hardly have to point out what a fragile arrangement that is, or how utterly unnecessary. Asking women, people of color, and so on to take an interest in my concerns isn’t putting some unreasonable burden on them — it’s treating them like human beings. To suggest that a black man or a lesbian woman can’t or shouldn’t be concerned with the problems of men — some of which, as it happens, are black — is to condescend to them and to rob them of basic moral agency. It is, in short, a rather disgusting attitude if its implications are considered even in the slightest.

And this all goes back to my main concern about feminism as an identity rather than a form or a method of activism. It’s probably true, in terms of definition, that it isn’t especially feminist to help men with their issues. But why would you want to preclude the possibility of helping men just because it wasn’t feminist? This attitude has been most troubling when institutionally important white feminists have refused to acknowledge or support women of color because of a supposedly unfeminist emphasis on race among these women — fighting racism may not be definitionally the most feminist thing possible, but obviously a decent human being is going to take an interest in it regardless. I’m not saying this as an argument against feminism. I’m saying it as a critique.

And I’m making that critique as part of a cry for help. But it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that if help is going to come, it’s not coming from the quarters I had hoped it might.